Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#151

Post by CydeWeys » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 12:13 PM UTC

throwaway_1299 wrote: post #15

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It seems one could even argue that Google's focus on algorithmic rather than human solutions is a kind of harmful ideology It's the kind of ideology that you often find in people who think they are smarter than everyone else.

As someone who is in a similar domain / company, no one knows how to do this at planet scale unless you narrow it down to a very short list (which is typically very large sums of money). My back of napkin math from another comment: I work in a similar space and it is significantly complex and expensive to do this. Back of the napkin math - * Lets say on average customers contact Google support once a year for each pr…

> That is 2.5M tickets/support requests a quarter. ~28M tickets a day *

What happened to the math here? I'm not following this step?

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#152

Post by KMag » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

scottrogowski wrote: post #116

sandworm101 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> videochat Big red flag. If you are connecting random people via video chat you open yourself to all sorts of abuse. I'm not saying that it is happening on your service, just that advertizers (and therefore google) are wary of videochat.

I am not connecting random people via video chat (the site generates a unique url that is meant to be shared among friends). However, even if I was connecting random people, I think it would have been appropriate for them to specify why they suspended my account. I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though. This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/ad…

Do you used the current date/time and/or Math.random() to generate your random URLs client-side?

I left Google's indexing system 10 years ago, but back then, I made some inelegant workarounds to prevent these features from breaking duplicate page detection. I'm nearly certain the code I wrote has all been replaced with something Chrome-based, but I'm just trying to think of things that could trip up page analysis.

I could see how very rare patterns that are typically used to intentionally trip up page analysis might put your pages on some bad actor list. I really have very little idea how these auto-detection systems are implemented, and these are wild guesses, but they're hopefully better than nothing.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#153

Post by danShumway » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

henryfjordan wrote: post #105

danShumway wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to medium-to-heavy push back on this. Techdirt didn't build a single point of failure into their revenue stream, otherwise the title of this article would be, "Why is Techdirt closing down?". Their support page[0] lists 8 different revenue sources other than Google Ads. And this is precisely the type of diversity that you want. Signing up for 5 different ad networks isn't really good diversity, because: A) you…

You don't add a second ad network to widen your revenue stream just like you don't have a backup ISP to double your bandwidth. You do it so that when you have a (temporary) outage with one you can quickly switch to the other and not lose operations. There are some classes of outages that might affect both ad-streams, but there are other classes (like account status issues) that are completely independent.

But that depends a lot on whether or not the outage is actually temporary. From the sound of this article, it doesn't sound like it is.

Sure, Techdirt is hedging its bets and saying it might turn Google Ads back on eventually. But the account issues they're talking about aren't going to go away; there's nobody you can yell at with Google to make their moderation suddenly better.

I still want to push the idea that if you're diversifying your income, you should actually diversify it, not just have multiple accounts in the same field. There are independent issues that might effect one ad network and not another, sure. Those independent issues also won't affect podcast ads or product sponsorships.

In other words, redundancy != diversity.

Not to say redundancy is useless, of course. But it really doesn't sound like redundancy is Techdirt's problem here, it sounds like they're disillusioned with page ads in general.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#154

Post by InfiniteRand » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #80

madacoo wrote: post #4

It's refreshing to see an assumption of incompetence rather than malice, since I seem to have come across the idea that Google is questionably motivated by ideology rather a lot recently. One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. Surely the frequent false positives ends up hurting potential revenue? And would it not be able to hire people to at le…

> One thing I don't understand is why Google continues to try to use algorithmic solutions for content moderation. I don't mean to sound condescending, but I think the answer to this question would be much clearer to you if you took a moment to try to comprehend the scale that google operates in.

One thing I imagine is if you scale up assuming that algorithmic solutions will be good enough, and then find out that they aren't, you find yourself in a hole, because you haven't budgeted enough to hire human moderators now, and you have enough visibility and investors that it is hard to scale down.

There was some post on HN I think about a Morrocan links site that basically got into this situation, his solution was to freeze sign-ups and look for someone to buy his domain, which is probably not an appetizing option for Google. I think MySpace's experience was also somewhat like this.

Of course, in reality the situation with Adsense is not that they cannot function while using algorithmic moderation, but that they cannot provide a high quality service, so whether they like or not the most viable option is to provide a lesser quality service.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#155

Post by jasonv » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #112

jasonv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reviewing self-service ad sales & serving plugins for Wordpress sites and my conclusion would be: no, there isn't.

We use advanced ads pro for Wordpress and it seems to work well enough for serving self-hosted ads. What are you looking for that it or others don’t offer?

There are a handful of decent "adsense/manage your own ads" and "add adsense to your site" plugins, but the self-service model wasn't rich with options. The few I did start testing had bumpy roads for implementing and managing the integration into the template.

I didn't test this one.

Appreciate the recommendation... will look into it further.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#156

Post by scottrogowski » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

KMag wrote: post #152

scottrogowski wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not connecting random people via video chat (the site generates a unique url that is meant to be shared among friends). However, even if I was connecting random people, I think it would have been appropriate for them to specify why they suspended my account. I doubt it had anything to do with the video chat aspect though. This is the link they pointed me to in their suspension email https://support.google.com/ad…

Do you used the current date/time and/or Math.random() to generate your random URLs client-side? I left Google's indexing system 10 years ago, but back then, I made some inelegant workarounds to prevent these features from breaking duplicate page detection. I'm nearly certain the code I wrote has all been replaced with something Chrome-based, but I'm just trying to think of things that could trip up page analysis. I…

I forget now whether I did it server-side or client-side but I do generate a random hex string, yes.

It's reassuring to hear that a former Google engineer shares my same suspicions as to why this happened. Thank you.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#157

Post by natch » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

zerocrates wrote: post #108

natch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After incompetence and malice, there’s a third option, or maybe a blend of two: arrogance and laziness. They’ve been sitting on top of the world for a while. The results sometimes speak for themselves. As a case in point, for over a full decade they have been flagging their own emails, that they send, that they know I signed up for, as spam. For a decade. Possibly as long as two decades.

You could interpret that in a positive way, that they're not just papering over problems in their filter by privileging their own messages. Not super positive but still.

I suspect that’s what they tell themselves. And that heuristics are beneath them. Better to have an elegant algorithm that does the wrong thing automatically than a set of human-tweaked rules that could come much closer (also automatically) to doing the right thing.

Re: Why are currently no ads on Techdirt? apparently Google thinks we're dangerous

#158

Post by throwaway45349 » Sun, Aug 16, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

y0ssr3n wrote: post #148

throwaway45349 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure there are whitelists (and blocklists). Off topic, but why is whitelist acceptable but not blacklist?

I think the preferred term is "allowlist" not "whitelist". I like Allowlist personally because it's immediately obvious what it means esp for less technical folk. It takes time for new terms to become commonplace.

Post hoc rationalisation, but okay. My non-technical friends know exactly what a whitelist/blacklist are but none of them have ever heard these new politically correct terms.